What It’s Like for a Breast Cancer Researcher to Go Through a Breast Cancer Scare

When I took off the bandages that morning in December 2015, I decided to write. I know I’m not the only one who has been through this, not by a long shot. In fact, about 1 in 8 women will go through the same ordeal in their lifetime. And still so few women talk about it and share their personal experiences.

I have a long history with breast cancer: family history, my work as a researcher who studies it, and a writer who writes about it. History in so many forms, and still I was unprepared for this moment — perhaps it’s impossible to ever be prepared for it.

It almost felt like a weird intolerable irony, a sad irony that I, as a researcher all my adult life studying breast cancer, now need to be subject to it.

Do I “deserve” it? Do I need to feel the pain to fully understand it? Did I bring it somehow on myself? Am I not appreciating my health and life?

Those questions kept coming to my conscious while I was trying to fight them away with no real success.

It was not the way to spend a Thanksgiving break by any means. I never anticipated that the holiday spirit I had so eagerly waited for would be stripped away so quickly.

Just a few weeks prior while I was with family and kids and looking forward to some quality time, I got the phone call: “There is a suspicious mass in your left breast that might be malignant”. The nurse reported the results from the MRI examination I underwent a few days earlier and added that I would have to have a biopsy as soon as possible and speak with a surgical oncologist. That call signified the first phase of waiting.

This first phase of waiting involves mainly pain: emotional pain, shoulder pain — pain everywhere. Darkness, tremors, anxiety, fear, sadness, nightmares at night (and during the day), a rapidly beating heart, a strong headache that does not go away, lack of appetite, reading for endless hours on the web, difficult painful discussions with family, stress . . . pain that distracts and that is there to stay.

In the days that followed I desperately attempted to maintain a “normal life”, at least outwardly. I wore large sunglasses (ones that would conceal my bloodshot eyes, resulting from worry and lack of sleep), played in the pool with the kids, ate dinner with friends, and tried to shop on Black Friday but didn’t buy anything. How could I? I was laughing on the outside, but hurting and beyond fearful on the inside.

My biopsy was scheduled the week after Thanksgiving, and per the surgeon’s recommendation it would involve a Core biopsy to analyze actual tissue — not just a few cells obtained via a needle biopsy. This was not pleasant sounding at all and as a person who has long studied breast cancer, I know it is a very painful procedure. But the physical pain was the easy part, and didn’t come anywhere close to the pain I was experiencing internally.

Phase two of waiting involved three weeks being suspended between my new reality that suddenly hit one fine day, and my hope that this would pass and things would return to the way they were before. It was three weeks of reassessing my entire life, preparing for the worst and reevaluating everything.

Thankfully there was no phase three. The catharsis came. It was not at all clear that I would have one. I prayed at night, long after everyone else was fast asleep. The relief of hearing that angel of a doctor saying, “it is benign, you have nothing to worry about, and can continue routine annual testing.”

Suddenly, all of the nightmares about what I might have needed to go through dissipated and dissolved as they burst into thin air like a giant soap bubble in the middle of a busy city. While technically nothing has changed, in many ways everything has changed. I’m grateful for that and feel deep appreciation. Today I give thanks to my family and friends more than ever and for all that I have.